Xmarks for BlackBerry Offers Mobile Access to your Bookmarks and Tabs

I have been a long time user of Xmarks (Previously Foxmarks) and am excited that they now have a BlackBerry app. The only catch is that you can only use the Xmarks app if you have a $12/year Xmarks Premium subscription. The thing is that Xmarks was almost shut down a few months back due to lack of income so they finally had to start charging for their service. On the other hand the service and app do have a 14 day free trial before you have to pay for a subscription.

With the Xmarks for BlackBerry app you can:

Add, update, and delete Bookmarks

View Open Remote Tabs

Kind of cool right? It was only last week when I was talking to some developers at the New York Dev meetup saying that somebody needs to create an app like this. Well now we have it! You can pick up the Xmarks for BlackBerry app at this link in App World.

I used Xmarks to link my macbook and pc desktop bookmarks a while ago, but I’m not sure if I would want to link with my Blackberries. Alot of the sites i have bookmarked on my Torch are mobile sites, and alot of the sites I have on my desktop I wouldn’t even attempt to load on my Blackberry.

Maybe once we see a faster rendering browser (1.2ghz cpu please!) I’ll take a look at something like Xmarks. But it’s too bad it’s a paid subscription now.. its understandable though, gotta get paid somehow!

I ditched Xmarks in favor of Firefox Sync a few weeks after their recent “we’re shutting down” announcement. I know they eventually changed their mind, but I haven’t switched back yet.

Things like this are making me reconsider Xmarks again.

However, all these bookmark sync services have one major feature oversight that annoys the heck out of me. None of them give you the ability to explicitly mark a bookmark folder as “do not sync”. Sure, they’ll invent some collection of sync profiles and other complicated features, but the very notion of “not relevant beyond this local browser” bookmarks is apparently a totally foreign concept.

(For me, those would usually be bookmarks to local HTML documentation on my current computer’s hard drive. I’d much rather simply “not sync” a certain folder than have to create some complex collection of sync profiles to cover that use case.)

I’ve been using it for 2 days now and I have to say, it is a very nice app. Nice interface, lightweight, quick…I’m currently using the free version but have been considering paying the $12 for a premium subscription (I’ve used it for quite awhile, $1 a month is reasonable IMO) and with this app now, I’ll probably get to upgrading this week.